During the Last week of December 1956, as the 85th Congress took up President resolution authorizing the use of force to keep the Communists out of the Middle East, the U.S. was fronted by an urgent world that was increasingly apparent the greater the distance from Capitol Hill.
One sure measure of the critical condition was that the Communists, from Moscow to Peking, were reacting against Eisenhower with a fury unheard of since their last hoped-for conquests slipped from their hands. Another measure was that the British, too long preoccupied with attacks on U.S. policy, were rallying around the point that the President’s plan for the Middle East is a real contribution to world stability.
The Eisenhower Doctrine was old and also new. It was old in the sense that it hewed (as the Truman Doctrine for Greece did) to the sustained U.S. objective of seeking an area-wide, indigenous capability of self-defense and an insulation of the area’s disputes against embroiling the rest of the world. It was new in that it projected the factor of U.S. power into a defense of the area. It was also new in its attempt to provide economic flexibility in achieving another sustained U.S. objective for the area— the raising of its economic level.
The features which recommended this policy to the Administration were:
1. It is bilateral (a point advocated strongly by Deputy Under Secretary of State Robert Murphy); it extends the U.S. offer of protection to individual Mideast nations, but only at their request; it does not require organization of the whole region to be effective.
2. Although it is designed principally to preserve the vast stretches of Arab territory from Communism, it also applies to the Arabs’ sworn enemy, tiny Israel, without taking sides. e It is informal; neither the requesting nation nor the U.S. has to sign a new pact, and sensitive nationalists are not required to line up on the U.S. side.
3. It is exclusively American and noncolonial. The U.S. is no longer coupled rigidly or identified in the Middle East with Britain and France—and yet the doctrine in no way excludes them but, in fact, helps to preserve a Western influence behind which the British and French may rebuild.
In this broadcast debate, part of the American Forum series, two leading of the House Foreign Affairs Committee: Congressman John Vorhees (R-Ohio) and Clement Zablocki take up the matter of the Eisenhower Doctrine on the Middle East, weighing pros and cons of U.S. support.
First broadcast on March 3, 1957 over NBC Radio.
